Ask PG: Why not to introduce #hashtags on HN?

10 points·dgudkov··8 comments

shouldn't the question be why, not why not?

I believe those who actively use hashtags on Twitter know what they are for -- it's amazingly useful feature that helps find exactly what you're interested in in seconds. Not only because of search itself, but because of collectively produced and commonly agreed hashtag names. As HN becomes more and more populated and signal/noise ratio goes down, hashtags would help HN readers not to lose important posts and replies. Exactly the same way as it works with Twitter now.

You can just search ... no # in front of Google still leaves you with "Google".

Search itself isn't the magic of hashtags. The magic is that a hashtag name is actually commonly agreed unique string ID of a theme or trend. How many unrelated results would you get if you search just for Google?

There's no consensus amongst hashtags... not even to actually use them or not!

There's no active consensus, but a defacto standard emerges.

If I want to talk about Google+, I'm more likely to use a hashtag, such as #googleplus, I've seen before. I could be a rebel and use #gplus, but it makes more sense to use already-established tags.

If we just experimented with hashtags on HN for a day or two, I'm sure they'd be hard to drop. (Although currently, I believe # is not allowed in titles)

For what purpose?

#ideasthatneedmorethought

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